A History of Kindness

Posted: Thursday Mar 21, 2024

How art holds us (part one)

How art holds us (part one) - by Kirstie McKinnon (substack.com)

Pale marble steps tap tap as I trot, quickly, then slow so I look like I’m part of the group. Mutabilis planted at the base of the high stone wall nods pink-orange-pink. A cool wind buffets stacked block corners, and whistles me through the iron gate. The scent of roses, a bite of salt in the breeze, my chest warm from rushing. Quick, stay with the group, they’re going inside.

Inside. A woman with bobbed hair and bright coral lipstick smiles at me, asks if I want a photocopied guide, at least I think she asks, I can’t quite make out the words for the immense hush. I smell old wood and stone. I shake my head, I say, ‘No thank you.’

‘Where are you from?’ she asks.

‘Dunedin.’

‘Dunedin?’

I nod.

The group of (Italian?) tourists veers left, her eyes follow them. I glide right. One thing. I’ll look at one thing, then go back to work, back to the office and the shelves of books. A fall of marble steps calls to me like water, but a sign says they lead down to the ‘vestry and office.’ I don’t want to go down there. Then, I’m caught on a pale slab of stone at the top of the stairs. Light flashes. There’s an angel in a cobalt sky. Remnants of wind flicker behind glass. Not one, but two figures. One is an angel with white and gold wings, the other a soldier in mediaeval armour.

I shift to hold the marble of the banister, it’s cool and smooth under my palms.

I glance between the panels, back, forward, back, forward, there’s something — then I get it. He died. The soldier in the grey mediaeval armour died. The angel is him again, transcended. And this angel tries to comfort me at the loss of the soldier. For a moment, the three of us stand there: me, the angel, and the soldier. Then the tour group flows past, down to the vestry and office, and my eye travels to the tops of their bobbing heads, and glossy hair to the base of the stained glass where an inscription is written:

“To the Glory of God and in loving memory of James Livingston, killed in action in France 26th Sept 1916. This window is erected by his wife and children. R. I. P.”

A little stunned, I return to work. The light outside is sepia. The wind is a cloak. The mutabilis waves me on.

At work, look things up. I find traces of James Livingston. I find him scrawled in army records, in his slap dash slanting script as he signs his life over. Yes. he writes to the question of whether he will serve. I find his regiment in the Otago Regimental Histories. Winter in France. A dead, torn and despairing landscape. I find out that a salient is an outward bulge in a line of military defence or attack where soldiers are exposed on three sides. James Livingston died somewhere on the march from a training campsite to the Ypres Salient. Killed in action, his file says, and says no more.

In Dunedin James Livingston’s wife wraps herself in a long wool coat, she huddles against the wind, and walks to an artist’s office. He listens. As he listens he begins to draw.*

He draws for days, wanting to get it right, capturing the shadows of the everything of the loss. He takes the work home at night, sketching late.

Days pass. She’s at his office again.

‘Something like this?’ he asks.

She nods, ‘Yes.’

Two little girls are with her this time. He gives them each a pencil, a sheaf of paper, four blackballs from a jar he keeps in his drawer. It’s not enough.

‘You’re very kind.’

He shakes his head, ‘It’s the least I can do.’

That night he reads In Memoriam by Tennyson, and words hold him a little.

The next day, he draws a full scale plan, sweeping lines across a table covered in butcher’s paper. It’s a big work. It will go in the new St Paul’s Cathedral, eventually, but for now he draws and thinks of the shapes of the glass he will need to cut, the fire of molten lead, and structure. When it’s time to paint, he fills a vast empty sky with shade, etches a handful of stars. Careful with each plate of armour, feather, flame, he brings the soldier home in the only way he can.